Sports Ethics: Keep Your Edge

“I lost my edge.” Athletes and professionals mutter this when they struggle with their skills and when they begin to feel their skills eroding or when they feel competitors starting to surpass them.  I think the idea of keeping our edge generates powerful ethical and psychological insights about what how high achieving individuals live. What does it mean to play at the edge?

Think of edges in two ways. First, edges can be sharp, dull or somewhere in between. Generally dull edges do not function efficiently; cutting or acting takes more effort and is less responsive.

Second, edges function like boundaries. Athletes and people confront several ways of being at the edge. They grapple with the edge of their own talent, training, character or focus. Individuals also face the edge of the skills and training required to succeed in their endeavor whether sports or any professional capability. Individuals live at the edge where they rub against other competitors.  Finally individuals risk falling off the edge of their emotional, moral or professional lives.

When a person plays at the edge of their talent and energy, they marshal internal energy and attention. This internal organizing helps them function with maximum effort and efficiency. People at their edge push their skill and attention and energy. They see each achievement as a new boundary, a new edge to perform that they hone as an edge, but one that they struggle to surpass. Individuals perform flat out and they are always pushing themselves to get better at what they are doing. This level of acting can exhaust people quicker, but being at the edge keeps athletes and people more alert and functioning at high levels. Facing a competitor playing at their edge forces contenders to push themselves harder. Self-aware individuals know the risks they take by treading at their boundaries, but risk it to succeed and win.

A person cannot drive to the borderlands of their sport unless they thrust to the edge of their talent and effort. At the edge, the best athletes and minds develop new strategies, new skills, new training approaches to exploit the possibilities of the game and persons. Facing the best, taking risks, trying new ways or mastering old ways, constantly adapting to the other side’s moves and training, all involve living at the edge.

I am not talking about being “edgy” for the sake of being cool or hip or being “edgy” for the sake of style of calling attention to oneself. To keep your edge in performance, involves internal discipline, self-awareness, situational attention and risk taking.Being at the edge takes harsh honesty about one's own potential and effort.  It means the courage to fail and the resilience to get back up and try again. Competing at the edge entails remembering that no one in your field is standing still and you don’t get better by being comfortable.

Unfortunately falling of the edge can wreck a moment or a person or an execution. Playing at the edge is not the same as playing out of control, but it can easily evolve into out of control. Losing control like honing a blade so that it becomes too sharp but thinned and brittle, 

Keeping an edge requires self-knowledge. People who risk the edge need to know their limits but always be pushing slightly beyond them. Edges can loom as precipices that tempt folks to fall off. On the other hand, once a person achieves an edge and masters it, the edge becomes solid ground for them. They live and act, and soon enough the edge dulls. They take it for granted and live that way too often. Pushing to the edge or sharpening skills, requires endless recalibration of skill sets and character and what one can do. It means not only being self-aware of strengths but motivated intention to push them as well as compensating for weakness.

In a critical way playing at the edge can alert athletes when they need to pull back. People use the metaphor to climb a mountain to capture the drive and ability needed to play at the edge in any area. But mountain climbing is dangerous and people fail, start-over and fall off edges. Sometimes individuals discover edges we could once transverse are blocked or no longer within our skill set. This does not mean quit, but it involves self-assessing, changing focus, developing new or undervalued skills and character to keep playing and competing.

Falling off an edge can lead us to get back up and try again but it can also warn us to change paths and proficiencies.

At the same time keeping your edge can mean always looking for an edge on your opponents. This drives innovation and work ethics. But, left unchecked by integrity and strong rule enforcement can lead persons to cheat. It may mean using PEDs or figuring out ways to live at the boundary of the rules or push them until caught. The dynamic of the edge cuts both ways and takes integrity and strong support from peers and leaders to stay on the edge and not fall off.

Being at the edge creates its problems. Keeping the edge should not be confused with being “on edge.” We’ve all been there, some of us more than most.  You know the moment when a person is so tightly wound up that they startle or jump. They tighten up under stress or anticipation. The tightening narrows perception, cuts speed and reaction and dilutes situational awareness. People on edge overreact and often react to the wrong stimulus, it makes them vulnerable to fakes and tactical misdirection as well as undercutting fluid and smooth relations with their fellow teammates. It makes it harder to listen because a person on edge internally constricts their focus and filters out important information.

Managing and leading professionals who live at the edge requires a different approach then just managing those who are good or even very good, but living within their comfort zones. Managing egos, keeping team together and just refining skills around the edges makes good sense. But this leadership style does not lead to maximum performance but it will minimize errors and that can count for a lot during long haul seasons or professional actions. Eric Wedge the present manager of the Seattle Mariners sums it up in a very existential way. “You’ve got to play every day like it’s your last.” This creates a moral and psychological edge that needs to be managed and watched.

Life and performance at the edge is critical to highest achievement and professional growth. But edges cut both ways and can erode a player and force them over the boundary if the individual and their managers do not manage the moral and psychological balance needed to live at the edge.

Growth and achievement lie at the edge of potential and challenge.

What Do Good Sports Referees Really Do?

Well the “replacement” referees of the NFL have been exiled, and the “regular” referees returned to a standing ovation, only to be booed ten minutes later. We all learned that the job of a referee is not easy and requires training, experience and presence. The NFL along with most fans assumed anyone could be a referee, now we know this is not the case. For one thing referees have to have enough integrity not to be corrupted, but that is only the beginning Good referees must not only be technically competent but must possess the authority and leadership to control the culture of the game on the field.

All sport competitions are GAMES, and games depend upon rules. The rules define the purpose and internal coherence of the actions among players. Rules define who wins and loses, how to score and above all what behaviors are permitted in pursuit of scores and victory. In the crucible of competition, rules require authoritative interpretation to hold the game together.  The replacement referee experience reminds us how central a “good” referee is to making sports competition work.

I want to think about the ethical and social role that referees play in sports competition. They key lies in the fact that referees act as the authority in a game. Good referees know how to technically call the game but good refs also influence the culture of play on the field with their authority. Both functions are vital and related.

·      They regulate the game by technically interpreting rules. They make calls and call fouls and enforce rules and penalties.

·      They control the “tone” and “tempo” of the game and profoundly influence on field attitudes and potential for mayhem.

First, the technical competence involves more than book learning. Like most professional areas, sports competition segments into levels of expertise and elite competition. As the level of competition rises, the speed, size and stakes or the games grow, so do the technical demands on the referees.

To be a technically competent referee a person must:

•        Understand rules and be technically competent:
•        Understand patterns of play;
•        Be able to see violations under pressure and speed of play;
•        Be clear and decisive in the calls;
•        Know the tricks of the trade where players hide violations or fake being fouled;
•       Withstand intimidation that players, coaches and crowds will bring pressure upon a referee.

Even good referees, however, will make mistakes. I live in Seattle and remember what referees did to the 2005 Seahawks in the Super Bowl. I am from the PAC10 where our referees grew into a national joke and miscalled several vital games on national TV. Reforming our referees was one of the major jobs of the new commissioner. I remember how umpire Jim Joyce destroyed Armando Galarrago’s perfect game with a blown call.

Even good referees will make mistakes just like good people will make mistakes. The key lies whether the error is an anomaly in a competent performance. If the referee or umpire has earned respect and credibility over time, people will give the referee the benefit of the doubt. They will “live with” the mistakes in light of an overall competence and professionalism that the players and coaches trust.

Experienced players and coaches know that mistakes happen and that mistakes tend to even out over the course of a game and season. You win some you lose some. This is true even as stakes go up.

While fans, coaches, and players may scream and yell, most will accept mistakes from honest and competent referees whom they know they will see again. This is doubly important so players can “let go” of a bad call and get their head back into the game. Players know that they will face these referees in the future. No player wants to create permanent animus with a referee who will judge him or her on a regular basis. The inexperienced and marginally competent replacement referees aggravated both these issues as players could not let go and eroded the authority and position of the judges.

The technical competence issues flow seamlessly into the authority/credibility issues. Referees earn part of their authority from their competence and fairness—their professional integrity. A good referee is a good technician. However this is not enough given the emotional energy and physical intensity, contact and aggression in the game. The competitive energy in games can feel like fusion reactors ready to blow escalate out of control and good referees provide the toroid field to hold and channel that energy.

Good referees earn a deeper authority and respect to perform the most important function. The “calls” take place in the context of the tempo, flow and feel of the game. Referees control the feel of the game, the level and type of social interaction among the players and set the critical boundaries for behavior that limits and focuses aggression and ferocity of players. Sometimes teams simply do not like each other and bring a deeper level of antagonism onto the field. Good referees channel the competitive energy, bound the potential hostility and keep opponents from turning into enemies on the field of play.

Players compete to win. They hate to lose. They strive for every minute advantage. Top competitors will live at the edge of the rules pushing to maximize any competitive advantage. In the heat of high stakes competition egged on by coaches and wild fans, players need incredible self-control to keep focused and keep their cool. They have a hundred reasons to get angry or retaliate during any game. Many players spew an endless stream of vitriol to get inside player’s heads and get them to lose it.

Referees buttress the players self control, and like parents referees give players an extra reason and incentive to keep it together under stress or temptation.

Holding the competition together involves artful leadership. One size does not fit all given the differences among players but also game contexts. Sometimes referees might calm players. They may talk, joke, and touch them. Sometimes they explain, sometimes stare down, sometimes coldly ignore. Somehow referees have to ignore and tame hyperthyroid coaches ranting at them. A referee may ignore a host of minor or meaningless violations to maintain a level of play and tempo and will focus upon critical or impactful violations. A referee can warn sometimes but at a critical moment may make a hard and harsh strategic call to affirm a boundary of behavior.

So controlling the tenor of the game involves a tightrope. You can hear coaches, crowds and announcers screaming “let them play.” It sometimes can feel like the “referees have taken control of the game” by their obvious and limiting calls. We talk about “ticky tack” fouls for minor infractions. Constant foul calls destroy the chance for either team to gain rhythm or momentum. This undercuts the skill and proficiency of both teams as well as enjoyment of the game. Yet at other times, players verge on violence; too much pushing too much after the play contact; too many hard fouls. The sport does not matter, but at the tipping point where aggression erupts into mayhem decisive referees must do the exact opposite and call some hard and quick and decisive fouls to stop the spiral of anger and physical contact that can coil out of control. They have to take control of the game.

In the NFL debacle the referees were bad on two counts. They were not corrupt and were well intentioned, but they were not competent and they had no authority. The more errors they made the less chance they had to develop authority. So the number of minor skirmishes escalated; coaches grabbed them; players pushed and informal violence on the field crept up along with the bad calls and wavering decisions.

The downward vortex of disrespect, errors, mounting violence and frustration were destroying the game on the field and endangering players. Good referees create a holding environment for the competitive passion and ferocity and tension of the game.

A friend who is a superb referee once told me, "I know I have done my job when I am invisible." He got it exactly right, a good referee shapes and flow and fairness and competence of a game that enables the players to play at their highest capacity and we focus on the play, not the rules. This NFL experience had far less to do with the technical competence and far more with the deeper moral role of referees as the stewards of behavior and culture on the field of play.

The Mad Logic of Early College Athletic Commitments

The University of Washington got a commitment to play football this summer from a fourteen year old quarterback. The school had actually offered the scholarship to the fourteen year old, and the child and his parents accepted. This once would have raised eyebrows, now it has become the norm. This new normal in college athletic recruiting is wrong in so many ways but will continue because it is driven by a crazy but real logic.

It all begins with the  professionalization of kids sports in the United States. The professionalizing of 10 year olds and their sports is driven both by parents and the cycle of AAU and club teams. Early recruiting of college athletes also drives the process. Two years ago the basketball coach of USC (now departed) offered a scholarship to a fourteen year old. Everyone gasped, now it is becoming a norm across all sports to make offers to kids who have not even gotten their first year of high school grades. This whole approach mocks of the ideal of a college "student" athlete scholarship. In the world of AAU sneaker-assisted basketball, it is not unusual for a 15 year old to have over 100 scholarship offers.

The drive to early scholarship offers is not healthy or even reasonable. Coaches don't like it. Let me repeat, Coaches do not like it, but they have embraced it with gusto. The reason being that if they don't act fast, someone else will swoop in. This is one of those economic market situations where everyone is bidding to the lowest common denominator. Most college coaches, right now, are not comfortable unless they have already locked up most of the class of 2014--that means most offers have gone out to sophomores and freshmen!


Coaches make these offers to  "kids" of 14 and 15. The coaches have no real clear view of the young person's character, body shape and emotional and physical development. Let's not forget that you are offering scholarships to student athletes. No one has any idea what kind of a student a fourteen year old will be in high school let alone college. While coaches have a pretty good fix on the body shape of 15/16 year old young women, many scholarships are now going out before the young women hit puberty and risk huge body and emotional changes that will impact the young players. .

For a long time football resisted many of the early offer trends because football depends so much upon getting a clear fix upon the bone/body structure of the players. Boys  generally developed much later and coaches held off. No longer the case. Football has succumbed to the rush of early offers and now 14 year old quarterbacks like here at UW and others get offers from major colleges.

One of the main drivers for early offers besides the dynamic among coaches, is the desire of parents for certainty. Most parents see sports as an investment. Parents and sometimes guardians have invested thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of time and energy into supporting the athletic development of their children. For many parents, especially from working class and low social economic status homes, athletics represents the way out for their children. In some homes, the investment hinge upon a dream of their children become professionals and that jackpot will benefit the entire family.

Parents want certainty and return on their investments. The earlier the offers, the less uncertainty. So for the calculations of parents wanting a return on investment and reduced uncertainty, early offers are a godsend. Unlike their kids, parents will let coaches know of offers and play off offers from one coach to another. They are just acting like good parents trying to get the best deal for their kids but also trying to get the best return upon 10 years of investment in time and treasure for their children.

Coaches' associations have tried to develop guidelines urging coaches to not bring students in for visits early or not offer scholarships until late junior year. Self regulation always fails. It only takes one coach to make one offer and the whole system collapses because that coach now has a competitive advantage over coaches who are waiting for the proper developmental or times to make offers. So coaches compete to the bottom offering scholarships earlier and earlier. They don't like it, but do it. If they don't someone else will.

When a prominent coach lionizes a young man and offers him a scholarship at the age of 14, it is hard to respect the 14 year old's decision. The kid is 13! How many of us want to hang our futures on decisions we make when we are 14? The parents may be involved and even stage managing the offers, but this is not about a reasonable decision by kid or coach. No one should have to commit their lives at age 14 and be held to it.

These offers are always "informal" and usually made at sports camps which are exempt from many NCAA rules about no contact with recruitable student athletes. Students are not even allowed to make official visits to colleges until they become rising seniors in  of high school. Yet by now most coaches have already sown up their class of 2013 and are working on 2014 and 15 classes. Very very few student athletes actually make decisions based upon official visits. In college recruiting coaches are not allowed personal contact with student athletes until those official visits. But there are exceptions, whole universes of exceptions.

Most recruits meet coaches at summer camps. The camps are critical for coaches to augment salaries especially for their assistant coaches, raise money and to get to see and connect with student athletes. The contacts made at camps, often when kids are barely in their teens, are critical to coaches and kids. Both see the camps as mini-tryouts.

In addition, many students take unofficial visits. These are often self-financed visits where a student athlete and parents or guardians visit a campus, meet with coaches and players long before their senior year. Students can watch practices meet with advisors and do anything that could be done on an official visit.

Many kids can't afford to take these unofficial visits, so the whole unofficial visit world has a class bias to it. It also generates a geographic bias since kids can visit schools that are relatively close. Students get around these limits with the help of club teams. If a club team just happens to play a game or tournament in the vicinity of a university, the student can visit the campus compliments of the club travel. Besides schools save money by not having official visits. Many schools regard the official visits as a waste of time and money since almost all the recruiting is finished by the time "official" visits even begin.

In addition, coaches fly all over the country to watch AAU, club and high school teams at tournaments. The coaches strut and vie with each other to be seen. Coaches have to do it because all the other coaches are. They have to prove to the student they are recruiting that they care enough to be there. They also have to babysit students who have committed but may be still tempted by other coaches.

So the press to earlier and earlier scholarship offers simply blasts air into the furnace of unregulated pre-college sports and clubs. No one has figured out how to end the cycle.

The whole early recruiting game is now big news. Scouting services, especially in the revenue sports of basketball and football, assiduously track who is commited to whom. Rabid fans follow specialized sites to see who is getting the biggest name recruits. Media shows up for athletes to announce decisions, even though coaches cannot publically comment upon their recruits. So the media and private camps and tournaments and scouting services as well as AAU and club teams now have vested economic interests in keeping the recruiting process lively and full time.

Nothing is stopping the mess from getting worse. The drive to make offers of scholarships to younger and younger students continues even though coaches, faculty and administrators recognize it makes no sense. Only some sort of national NCAA legislation will get at the problem. Self regulation by groups or coaches simply does not work.

The NCAA has twice in the last five years rejected the proposals for their Academic and Recruiting cabinets for rein this in or outlaw all informal offers until junior years. Coaches want it, but the fear of enforcement problems, grossly over blown, and the interests of the top teams in keeping their monopoly grip on the best kids, leads to its defeat. So one more gross distortion and corruption of the ideal of the student athlete occurs. We offer scholarships to kids who have not yet attended a high school class. When faced with that hypocrisy, the entire NCAA membership votes to continue the practice.

I don't know the solution, but the excuse that it can't be enforced is no longer good enough to permit these practices to continue.

Retiring Calhoun Represented College Hypocrisy on Sports

One down and a bunch more to go.

Jim Calhoun the championship winning coach of the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball team retired this week. Calhoun won three national NCAA championships, and coached and recruited with a passionate intensity to win at all costs. He collected as many violations and probabtions as championships, but he and his school did not care. He embodied the coach whose sole purpose in life remained to win, period. He was not worried about character, grades, education, but about winning championships, and he succeeded and his University rewarded him for it.  I'm glad he's gone.

The predictable econiums are coming his way from the paid literati of sports media—he always made good stories, valiantly fought cancer and defied the NCAA. The media made him into a sort of a bandit folk hero rather like Gerry Tarkenian at Nevada Los Vegas. This is misplaced praise and respect. He’s a schmuck. I will not miss him and neither should anyone else.

Calhoun epitomized a long and ignorable tradition of college basketball coaches who won and won big, but could care less if his players got an education. He treated NCAA rules as signposts to be ignored when convenient. He ranks up there with Bob Huggins of Cincinnati and West Virginia with his mockery of the academic and student side of being a student-athlete. I would put him with John Calipari of Kentucky, but John Calipari lives in a different moral universe entirely where students, grades and academics not only don’t matter they don’t exist.

Calhoun is interesting from another aspect. Despite his resolute inattention to academics and graduation, the various UConn Presidents supported him. Why? Because like Joe Paterno at Penn State, Calhoun helped put UCONN on the map. No one knew about the university until it became a basketball power. The school, like Penn State, hitched its reputation and recognition to its athletic program. Like Penn State it has been willing to look the other way and put up with penalties and undue booster influence to win championships and market itself. Who knew about UConn before Calhoun? So the University defended its coach even as he made a mockery of its educational mission. 

I won’t go into Calhoun’s record, nor his championships. His strength was playing to his talent. Players loved playing for him although he could be cruel, demanding, irascible and relentless. After all no one had to go to class, no one worried about grades or about money and the players won. Two dozen went on to three and eight year careers at the professional level. His teams played with relentless intensity and players reached their maximum athletic potential under him. He knew how to draw out the best athletic performance from the talent he recruited. For this he deserves recognition.

But from the perspective of the NCAA and someone who believes in student athletes as both an ideal and a possible reality, Calhoun represented the worst, except for Calipari, that college basketball could offer. His kids did not go to class and when they did, they did not perform.

Calhoun was not a big character guy; he was a winning guy. Most of the really good coaches try to impart character and life development through the skills and focus needed to succeed on the court. Calhoun, to his credit, never claimed to care about character or about teaching kids to live well. This fit with his utter lack of concern about them actually getting an education. The kids cooperated in this because at the talent level he recruited many expected to and would play professional ball.

We will leave aside the fact that the average professional career is three to five years and 70 percent leave the pros bankrupt. The great advantage of the American system over the European system lies in the fact that college can leave its student athletes with a life and career and skills after sport abandons them.

A team has to work hard to have a low APR, which is a surrogate measure for staying in school and graduating. But the APR provides a pass for players who become professional athletes early. This means we are looking at a very small number of basketball players at Connecticut under Calhoun. The only other master who approached this was Huggins in his days at Cincinnati where he burned through players and left them by the way side without a degree or an education.

Calhoun and Connecticut have unique honor of being one of the first schools for being denied entrance to the NCAA tournament for failure to graduate students at the 50 percent rate demanded by the APR. You have to understand that this rate excludes students who leave early to become professionals—they are given a pass. So this means that the students who do not go professional do not graduate and do not get the educational advantages or tools that the colleges promised the kids but especially the parents and guardians.

I am not a Pollyanna. Most college basketball and football players are not particularly excited about going to class and learning. They believe in, and often their entourage is invested in, the dream of going professional. But most fail and even when they achieve it, they end up at age 25 without sports or an education. So good coaches and committed schools use the motivation of play, or practice time and invest in tutoring and guidance to help those reluctant students learn to learn and grow into students by their junior or senior year. We have abundant data that this can and does occur with a very high level of frequency; it also happens far more now than before the reforms of the last six years.

Calhoun was not a good college coach. He won, but he was not a good college coach from any perspective linked to education. He leaves his team on probation and banned from tournaments. If the rules had been in place earlier, they would not have gone to a tournament for years.

But let’s be honest. Calhoun, Huggins and Calipari could not exist if the colleges pledged to the idea of student athletes did not let them. The colleges not only let them get away with not attending to education, but pay them huge salaries, name buildings after them. The Presidents of Connecticut and Kentucky praise their coaches as educators. As a teacher I can rail all I want and as a teacher I can respect the coaches who do take education seriously, get their students to class, made education and character aspects of coaching—but modern college Presidents are notoriously willing to hire and lionize coaches who do nothing but win. Calhoun is a representative of the worst moral hypocrisy of the system. I won’t miss him, but there are plenty more like him.